A blogspot for sermons preached by a pastor who leads two historic Baptist congregations in the western piedmont of North Carolina.

Sunday, September 21, 2014

“Living In Color”

A Sermon Based Upon Romans 7: 14-8:6.

By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, DMin

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership

Sunday, September 21th, 2014

“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are
in Christ Jesus. (Rom 8:1 NRS)

I grew up
when Westerns were king. Some of you
remember when they dominated Black and White TV and Hollywood Movies: Roy
Rogers, Rawhide, The Rifleman, Gunsmoke,
and all those John Wayne and Clint Eastwood movies. It was a different world and a very different
way of looking at our world.

In most
every Western, eventually the good guy wins and the bad guy loses. All you had to do was figure out which ones
are the good guys, and who was really on the right side of the law. Life was a still great challenge, but it was
simple and not complex. Each Hollywood
Western was the way America explained itself saying, “A man’s got to do, what a man’s got to do!”

In our text today the
apostle Paul would be sympathetic, but would whole-hardheartedly disagree with John
Wayne ‘s western-style of philosophy. If
the Christian life is only a matter of ‘black and white’, we’re all in trouble. Paul sees himself as basically a good guy,
but he’s wrapped up in a human body that is sometimes incapable of good and too
capable of bad. Instead of the one
coming to the rescue, he’s the one who is tied up on the railroad track as the
whistle is heard and the ‘train of truth’ approaches. He cries out in all honesty and desperation: “Who
will rescue me from this body of death?”

WHAT THE LAW CAN DO

Normally, the law and the
lawman was righteous and good in the typical Hollywood western. In a similar way, Paul would agree that the
“law” is good and has an important role to play in the Christian life: “If it had not been for the law, I would
not have known sin…” (7:7). He
uses the commandment “Thou Shall Not Covet” as an example. If it had not been for the commandment he
would not understand that coveting is wrong.

If you take a trip to
Washington DC, and walk up the steps of the Capital Building, you see 9 of the
world’s great lawgivers in relief form.
The most dominate figure in the middle is Moses, who mediated the Ten
Commandments. The point is that we are
a nation that is built upon law and it even hints, if not suggests, that the
final source of law comes from God.

Assad Meymandi, is a
medical doctor with a PHD, who lives in Raleigh, though he is a native of Iran.
He is also an adjunct professor of
psychiatry at the UNC School of Medicine at Chapel Hill. Last year, he wrote in the Raleigh Paper: “America is not great because of its
prosperity. It is not great because of the proverbial American Dream of a brick
home with a two-car garage. It is not great because it gives us security,
opportunity and order. It is not great because of its advanced technology and
its number of Nobel Laureates in science, medicine, literature and humanities…. America is great because it is a nation of
laws and because of its absolute commitment to uphold and maintain the
supremacy of the rule of law….

….”On the local scene, a couple of years ago, with astonishment and awe”,
he wrote, “ I sat and watched the court
proceedings of former Gov. Michael Easley on television. Astonishing, because a
former chief executive officer of a sovereign state was being sentenced. Awe, because of the unshakable and
uncompromising supremacy of the rule of law in America….

He concludes: “America, from time to time, may go down
financially and our state might have a $3 billion budget deficit, but nowhere
on earth are the sanctity and supremacy of the rule of law so cherished and
enshrined in the nation’s psyche as they are in America. God has
blessed our beloved nation, the United States of America, and we are blessed to
be Americans….

Although Paul is speaking of
the law mostly in religious terms, and while Dr. Meymandi’s assessetment is primarily
political, they do intersect. You cannot
be a people, a nation, a religion, nor a decent human being without some sort
of rule of law. No nation, nor any
people, no matter how free, how liberated or how religious we are, or will ever
be able to sustain themselves without law.
The law is foundational, basic, and most necessary to all or any human
life and existence.

But still according to Paul
logic, the law has a big problem. It
does not really deal with, nor does it curb our ‘desire to sin’ or break the law.
Paul says, that this is not the
law’s fault, but the problem is still sin.
The power of sin still uses the law to awaken all kinds of sin
(7.9). The very law or commandment that
promises ‘life’ proves to be ‘death’ because it does not get rid of our desire
to sin, but can in fact, increase it
(7.13). Again, this does not
mean that the law is bad, because Paul still affirms that the law is necessary
(7.7) as it is ‘holy and just and good’
(7.12). The law is a great spiritual
resource (7.14) not because it gets rid of sin, but because it shows us just
how strong the power of sin is at work in each and every one of us (7.13).

WHAT THE LAW CANNOT DO

Even though the law is
good, spiritual, and holy (God’s and human), it still doesn’t stop evil desire
that brings death and destruction. Our
human situation, both moral and spiritual, is exactly what Paul wants us to see
as he takes us into one of the most autobiographical texts in all of the
Bible. Even though Paul has the law,
knows the law, teaches the law, and tries to live the law, he says, the law
cannot give him a new desire to do good:
“I do not understand my own
actions. For I do not do what I want,
but I do the very thing I hate” (7.15). Here we see within Paul’s own desire to
do good an inability to perfectly do good in every situation. The law has its limits. Even though the law is perfect, the human
person can never follow the law perfectly.
The law can affect us externally, in that it can make us realize our
need to do right; but it cannot affect us internally; it can’t make us always want
to do right. If we only live by the law,
we will find that ‘sin’ keeps raising its ugly head.

An interesting thing
happened in Vernon, Vermont, several years ago, when a driver by the name of
Bryan Condo stopped at a stop sign, saw a police car coming down the street,
rolled down his window, waved for the police officer to stop and then asked the
officer to arrest him for drunk driving. It seems that Bryan Condo had been out
drinking, and he had four times the legal limit of alcohol in his blood. But instead of pretending that everything was
OK and that there wasn’t any problem, Bryan Condo decided to admit that he had
done wrong. ("Drunken Driver Pulls Cop Over, Asks To Be
Arrested," Associated Press, 8/10/04).

What I can tell is that the
law alone did not make Mr. Condo do what he did– to admit that he did wrong, he
messed up, that he sinned. There was
something else at work in him that made him want to fess up on the spot. We can say that Paul, too wants to fess
up. As Paul looks at his own life and at
the lives of others, he realizes that deep down inside, most, if not all of us
want to do what’s right. Deep down
inside, most, if not all want to do good and we want to live the kind of life
that God intends for us. But the
problem, Paul realizes, is that there is often a difference between the good
that we want to do and what we actually end up doing. And the source of that problem, Paul reminds
us, is the law of sin. Even though we might have the best of
intentions, even though we might have the loftiest of goals, sin has a way of
sneaking in and turning something good into something worse than good.

When Paul concludes in exasperation,
he is being brutally honest with himself and with us. He has been a teacher and follower of the
law, but the law has not enabled him to move his life from black and white into
living color. In other words, if he
only has the law, he is neither set free from sin, nor from death. If he only has the law, he remains the
person he always has been, though he sincerely tries to obey. If he only has the law, he remains enslaved
and captive to an even greater ‘law’ in his heart and mind, the law of sin. The point is that even God’s law cannot
change him, transform him, or give him a new level of living that helps him
overcome his fears and flaws so he can fulfill his greatest potential.

WHAT LIFE IN JESUS WILL DO

But what the law could not
do, freeing him from the power of sin, and the desire to sin, Paul is now
thankful that God has rescued him
“through Jesus Christ.” (7.24-25). It sounds good, but how can this be
real? How can we get the man in Vermont
to change so that he is able to curb his desire to drink and drive? How can we get the person we can be to be
able to overcome our own weaknesses, shortcomings, and to live life on a higher
level? This is what the Christian life
is supposed to be, a life that gets us from the darkness of sin, and even
beyond mere black and white, into a life that is lived if full color and hope.

We have no condemnation The Christian Life
doesn’t begin where you think it should.
It does begin with admitting your weaknesses, but it does not begin with
admitting all your wrongs. The Christian life begins by finding God’s
pure, unmerited, and unconditional love.
“There is no more condemnation!” Any religion that does not begin here and
is not founded on Jesus Christ, but has reverted back to legalism. No condemnation means simply this: None!
Nada! Zilch! Zippo!
Zero!

Now this is a strange way to start a religion. Only God can do something like this. In
John’s gospel we get clarification that “God
did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the
world might be saved through him” (John 3.17), and furthermore, John
writes, that ‘those who in him are not
condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already….”
(3.18). The point here is not that God
wants to condemn everybody that does not believe, but the point is that those
who do not believe live in condemnation already. The only way out of ‘condemnation’ is through
belief in God’s love shown to the world through Jesus (John 3.16).

The Christian life is
founded not upon what we’ve done or could ever do, but it’s founded upon what
Jesus did and only Jesus could have ever done.
Shown us God’s unconditional love on his cross.Tony Campolo tells
about getting a phone call at home. A voice said, "We need a minister. Our friend died, and we need a minister to do
the funeral." "When's
the funeral?" Tony asked. "Tomorrow." Tony
said, "I will be there." So the next day, he put on his preacher suit
and went over to the cemetery. He
was walking up to the graveside to do the service as people were gathering. Not
knowing the man who died, he was putting together some thoughts as he walked.
Just when he resolved to do this, he looked up to smile at the people who were
gathered. There were about a dozen men. No women, all men. Something began to
dawn on him, so he asked, "How did your friend Jerry die?" One
of them said, "He died of AIDS." Tony
said, "Did Jerry have any family?" "They
haven't talked to one another in years. We looked in on him when he got sick. I
guess we were the closest thing to family he had."
Tony said, "Did Jerry have a church background?"
"Sure, Preacher, all of us grew up in a church. That's why we
wanted a Christian minister."
Tony said, "Well, it's my privilege to be here. I thought I would
read some passages from the Bible."
One man said, "Could you read that passage from John 3:16?" Tony said, "Sure." He started,
"God so loved the word that he gave
his only begotten Son," and suddenly the rest of them chimed "so that whosoever believes in him would not
perish but have eternal life."

Somebody else spoke up, "How about that
passage about many rooms in the Father's house?" Tony said, "Sure," so he read from
John 14: "In my Father's house
there are many rooms...." By the time he said the first half of the
Bible verse, all the guys were joining in, "and I go to prepare a place for you, so that where I am, you may be
also."

Someone else said, "I remember where Paul
says, 'Nothing shall separate us from
the love of God,' " and most of them started completing the verse.
Tony said, "Here I was, a straight guy, with a dozen gay men, doing a
funeral for their dead friend. Every
single one of them knows the scriptures. They grew up memorizing those words.
We stood there trading verses for about half an hour. It was incredible!"

Finally he said, "All of you know your
Bible. Where do you guys go to church?" And they got very quiet. They
didn't say a thing. Tony said,
"Friends, I'm going to give you one more verse, and then we're going to
have a prayer. The verse is Romans, chapter 8, verse 1: 'Therefore, there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ
Jesus.' " That verse was still
hanging in the air, when one of the men said, "I wish I knew a church that
believed so strongly in Jesus that it would take me in."

"No condemnation." I believe it
says, "No condemnation for those
who are in Christ Jesus." Is there anybody here who really believes in
this verse? It is not easy, and it does not mean we have to agree with everyone nor condone sin. But the Christian life does begin without any condemnation. We can come to Jesus just like we are. We can repent of our sins, and we can even come "while we are still sinners" (as Paul said in Romans 5.8). God does
not condemn us, no matter what.

We have the power of the Spirit
When you know that you are
not condemned, but are loved, a new power can be released in your life. And when you are not condemning, but are
loving, a new spiritual power can also be released in you. We are not motivated by hate or
condemnation, but the Christian life is motivated by the Spirit of God's
love.

I witnessed that power
first hand back in the 1980's. This was
that time when the AIDS epidemic first started and no one knew what it was, nor
how contagious. I was a chaplain at
Baptist Hospital, and I was the one who was asked to go and see an AIDS patient
who was dying. It might be risky, they
told me. They said, I did not have to
go. I prayed about it, and I decided to
go in. I dressed up in all the
protective gear; including gown, gloves, and mask. He was angry and might spit at me, they
said. That could have been as dangerous
as a loaded gun. I went in anyway. Where did the power come from to do this? I'll tell you this; it didn't come from
me! I did not have the power not to condemn.
I
did not have the power to go in. But I went
in and prayed for the man anyway. And when I got home that night was afraid to
tell my wife about it. It wasn't me that
was so brave. Telling her scared me to death!

The only way I can explain
why anyone would live a life that followed the Spirit that takes us beyond what
is right and wrong; beyond what the law says should or shouldn't be done, and then
it is a Spirit that moves us to offer forgiveness, love and grace, no matter
what. The only kind of power that would inspire us to
do something like that is the same kind of power that kept Jesus on that cross,
no matter our sins. "Even while we were still sinners, Christ died for us...."
Paul says (Rom. 5.8). Jesus is the one who started this crazy way of
living without condemnation, I just hope he was not the last. Amen.

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About Me

With over 30 years of pastoral experience, I've been the pastor of churches in both North Carolina and Germany, where my wife and I served as Missionaries in the 1990's. I'm currently serving as the pastor of two small, rural churches in western Yadkin and northern Iredell counties. I'll be celebrating 30 years of marriage to Teresa in 2010 and we have one married daughter.